When I reflect on two decades of technology in social housing, I think about The Pretenders…
Towards the end of the decade known as the ‘noughties’, it wasn’t uncommon to still find green-screen systems, probably encased in a more friendly GUI, running at the heart of your typical housing provider. These business-critical systems would be fed and watered in a datacentre typically located in your head-office, and always accompanied by onerous business-continuity testing, fail-over systems, UPSs and overpriced and oversubscribed data links. In short, an endless major headache for heads of IT and the like in the quest for zero downtime.
Smart phones weren’t pervasive and were only found in the hands of the flush or a few tech-heads. End-user software had to be delivered via the ‘magic’ Citrix or remote installation on a PC, so IT support involved a lot of walking.
The idea of customers’ journeys traversing multiple systems to offer seamless service was much talked-about but the actual capability in the systems of the day to do so wasn’t. Likewise, the concepts of data-driven decision-making while driving insights and value from our data were being discussed but the costs were high and the technology a tad over-sold.
Thankfully, new opportunities in the form of global software players have emerged that support workflow, automation and integration.
Mobile working and big data are some of the many great benefits of our sector’s recent general migration to the cloud, contributing towards better staff retention, greater access to information and cost reductions. Similarly, the in-house datacentre is thankfully a thing of the past for most people.
So now we have ever-green integrated platforms closely aligned to business processes and customer journeys, don’t we? And have we thus enhanced customer satisfaction and created business efficiencies in the process of doing so?
Thanks to advances in mobile technology, our colleagues are much more confident to self-serve whether researching online, using websites, company portals and BI tools. However, they also expect more from us as their in-house purveyors of IT systems and services (that’s a good thing, by the way!).
The Pretenders’ lead singer Chrissie Hynde once sang, “some things change, some stay the same” and that pretty much sums up my reflection on the past 15-20 years.
While there has been much positive change, data quality is still a challenge and considered a risk to customer safety, a source of many inefficiencies and the primary hurdle for the effective use of AI.
Cyber-security threats are still around, just more prolific and more vicious, it would seem. And finally, no matter which part of the business we’re trying to improve by deploying better technology, we still need to understand our customers and the processes driving our services, really well to make the RoI ultimately stack up, and that’s not always a given.
And if you don’t know who Chrissie Hynde is or who The Pretenders are, just say “Hey Google…”.
Tony Blows is the CIO of The Riverside Group.
